Seminar: Fast food for Computational Scientists!

Speaker: Ganesh Venkateshwara, Research Staff, School of Computer Science (SoCS, ANU)

Date: Thursday, 05 November 2009

Time: 4:00 PM – 5:00 PM
Venue: CSIT Seminar Room, N101, CSIT Building, Building (108), North Road, ANU (campus map)

Website: Seminars @ CECS

Enquiries: Dr Malcolm Newey

“A sizable number of computational chemists (physicists, biologists and material scientists alike) use a wide variety of tools to perform computation, visualization and presentation. Many a times these are incompatible with each other, necessitating reliance on, often cumbersome, external tools    to perform appropriate conversions. A few of the computational chemists also use myriad programming environments to develop new computational codes or visualization tools. However, there is no environment that succinctly amalgamates programming environments and various tools available to a computational chemist, which many a times hinders easy integration and rapid application development.

“In this talk, I present MeTA Studio, a programmable cross-platform environment for computational chemists that aims to address this issue.”

This seminar is part of the CECS Seminar Series.

Ganesh Venkateshwara is a Post-doctoral fellow at the School of Computer Science, Australian National University, and is an active member of the school’s Computer Systems group.

Original Seminar Notice at: Fast Food for Computational Chemists, CECS Seminar List, The Australian National University

Article: India’s Toughest Contest

Author: Kate Sullivan, Phd Candidate, India specialist, Department of International Relations, The Australian National University

Published: Sunday, 01 November 2009

Full story at: http://inside.org.au/indias-toughest-contest/

Hope and perseverance drive the enormous number of young Indians with ambitions to work in government, reports Kate Sullivan

India's toughest contest

Kate Sullivan is a PhD candidate and India specialist in the Department of International Relations at the Australian National University.

Seminar: Can we Increase Software Development Productivity by an Order of Magnitude

Speaker: Shayne Flint, Senior Lecturer, School of Computer Science (SoCS, ANU)

Date: Thursday, 01 October 2009

Time: 4:00 PM – 5:00 PM
Venue: CSIT Seminar Room, N101, CSIT Building, Building (108), North Road, ANU (campus map)

Website: Seminars @ CECS

Enquiries: Dr Malcolm Newey

“Demand for software developers is increasing while the number of software engineering and IT students remains stable or in decline. At the same time, there is an increasing need to quickly build software systems in response to rapid social, economic and environmental change. The CECS Software-Intensive Systems Engineering (SiSE) group is addressing these issues by developing novel technology which aims to increase software development productivity by an order of magnitude.

“To achieve this objective we are exploring the use of Model- Driven Engineering (MDE) and ways to improve its effectiveness. Specifically, we are addressing problems in areas such as requirements and stakeholder management; integrating multiple viewpoints, cross-cutting concerns, modelling languages and paradigms; variations in architecture and implementation; model semantics, translation, synchronisation, evolution and reuse; the presence of uncertainty, imperfection and ambiguity; verification, scalability and visualisation. This is a long list, but our research indicates the possibility that many of these problems may be the result of entrenched assumptions that underpin existing approaches to MDE.”

In this seminar Dr Flint will demonstrate a new approach to MDE which is developed from a very different set of assumptions. The approach is proving effective and addresses or eliminates many of the problems with existing approaches. If commercialised, it could have direct and demonstrable economic impact by increasing ICT industry productivity and our ability to rapidly react to emerging opportunities and threats.

This seminar is part of the CECS Seminar Series.

Shayne Flint is a Senior Lecturer at the School of Computer Science, Australian National University, and is an active member of the department’s Software-Intensive Systems Engineering group. He started his career as a RAAF engineering officer and has worked in industry in various software/systems engineering, consulting, marketing, management and commercialization roles. Dr Flint has broad industry experience and is the originator of Aspect-Oriented Thinking, a systematic approach to developing, managing and integrating the multi-disciplinary knowledge and expertise required to understand and improve complex systems. Nowadays, he is driven by a desire to radically improve the productivity of software development, particularly within multi-disciplinary contexts such as environmental science and engineering.

Original Seminar Notice at: Can we Increase Software Development Productivity by an Order of Magnitude, CECS Seminar List, The Australian National University, 2009

A LaTeX setup for Mac OS X

A simple workflow for a fairly standard LaTeX setup for the Mac.

1. Download the MacTex disk image. Instructions for downloading and installing the disk image are available at the MacTex site. This will install the Texlive distribution, the TeXShop editor, and the BibDesk bibliography manager.
2. To add version control support for your documents, install Bazaar for Mac OS X.
3. Nicola Talbot’s “LaTeX for complete novices” is a no-frills tutorial which gets you started immediately.  For writing a PhD thesis, follow this up with “Using LaTeX to write a PhD thesis”.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 Unported License.

Article: Pragmatic ideals? After G8-G5, Indian PM heads for NAM summit

Author: Kate Sullivan, Phd Candidate, Lecturer, Department of International Relations, The Australian National University

Published: Tuesday, 14 July 209

Full story at: http://asiapacific.anu.edu.au/blogs/southasiamasala/2009/07/14/pragmatic-ideals-after-g8-g5-indian-pm-heads-for-nam-summit/

By highlighting the necessity of multilateral approaches to global challenges, Manmohan Singh’s rhetoric at the G8-G5 honed in on the utility rather than the morality of broad collaboration.

Kate Sullivan is a PhD candidate and India specialist in the Department of International Relations at the Australian National University. She lectures  Hindi-Urdu Filmi Hindi (a course on Bollywood film studies) at the Faculty’s South Asia Center. She is also the co-editor of the Research School of Pacific and Asian Studies’ new blog: South Asia Masala.